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It can be hard to evaluate the best films of the 2010s, when every damn year of the decade, especially from 2015 onward, have felt like ten years unto themselves. But movies, as ever, offer respite from that chaos. It’s been a decade that has offered impressive new voices in film and given different voices bigger platforms. Names like Jordan Peele, Ava DuVerney, Ryan Coogler and more have opened up important ideas to wider audiences, while also delivering top class entertainment. Long-term talents, from Scorsese and Soderbergh to Bong Joon-ho, Todd Haynes and Katheryn Bigelow, have changed with the times and done great work, even when it hasn’t been their defining masterpieces, these greats have produced films that audiences have latched onto and continue to engage with in interesting ways, our often noxious online discourse still providing the opportunity to grow cultural conversation. Still, that noxious shite can make even the most ardent film lover never want to talk about cinema again, and the last ten years have seen too many unwinnable bullshit battles waged by people determined to keep their beloved franchises for themselves only, or draft movies, sometimes at random, into the unending culture wars.

Netflix have changed the game completely for film distribution and audience engagement in ways we still haven’t fully processed since 2010, for better and worse, what even counts as a “film” and how we see them have been altered forever. After a relatively wobbly start to the 21st century that now seems impossible, Disney have become a monster in the 2010s, consuming one of the great film studios in the last year in Fox, reshaping history as they see fit, flooding and fixing the market, threatening all the positives in the paragraphs above. 80% of the box office is simply too much for one studio to hold, and cinema as an art form is at risk if the 2020’s continue to allow expression to be supressed in the name of expansion.

You can see some of what’s at stake in some of the great Irish films that have come out this decade, both on screen and off. Wonderful work has been done with local cinema thanks to collaboration with fellow European studios, and great films that in decades past only Irish eyes would have been watching have warmly received worldwide. Check out our Best Irish Films of the Decade list, coming soon, for some of the best of our country’s cinema. More of that in the times ahead of us please, especially for this website’s sake. There are always challenges, but without the vibrant cinema scene that has continued to grow in this country, Film In Dublin would never have started. With that in mind, it’s a good time to delve into some of our writer’s personal favourites of the decade, our Best Movies of the 2010s.

Directed by Todd Phillips, this latest incarnation of the clown faced supervillain has seen its fair share of controversy throughout its development right up to its release. Since premiering, Joker has sparked debates about how putting the fabric of violence on the big screen could inspire real life terror. It’s a kind of terror that the DC Universe is familiar with, after the 2012 shooting in Aurora Colorado during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Police officers have been present at screenings, and lead actor Joaquin Phoenix walked out of an interview when pressed on potential links the subject matter might have with copycats. This is nothing new, with parallels been drawn between Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and the 2005 Red Lake Shootings, as well as the alleged influence of Child’s Play 3 on the 1993 murder of James Bulger. These divisive topics demand a separate lengthy discussion, and while it’s certainly something I’ve reflected on after viewing the film, it’s not something I’m going to fully address here.

He has a unique set of skills, but Joe, the driven murder machine of Lynne Ramsay’s stunning thriller You Were Never Really Here, is far from the typical one-man rampage and the film has much more than cheap kill thrills on its mind. Taking a standard grim and gritty action film plot and considering it with depth, melancholy and honesty, this a film that prompts the question, once you’ve been ‘Taken’, can you ever really come back? And can the heroes tragic backstory truly push him forward or has it long-since pushed him over the edge, not a source of inspiration but a devastating destruction?

The full programme for ADIFF 2018 has officially launched. With over 100 feature films being screened, international stars visiting, seven world premieres and plenty of Irish ones, Dublin’s biggest film festival is looking better than ever. Setting the stage for the year to come in the fair city of film, the Audi Dublin International Film Festival is one of the most exciting times of the year for Irish film fans and this year’s programme promises the chance to see some of this year’s most eagerly anticipated movies.